Wednesday, 12 January 2011

According to a Twitter blog four seconds after midnight on January 1st, Japan Twitterers set an all-time record in the number of Tweets sent per second (TPS).

At that moment a whopping 6,939 TPS were sent to friends and followers wishing them “Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu” (“Happy New Year!”).

This frenzy of New year bonhomie more than doubled the previous record of 3,283 TPS, set during Japan’s victory over Denmark in the 2010 World Cup.

Twitter reports:

"On New Year's Eve, we saw epic Tweet activity around the world as people in each time zone inaugurated 2011. The East coast time zone alone almost amassed the same amount of Tweets at its peak of 3,000 TPS as the entire world did during the peak moment of the World Cup."

Not to be left out, Facebook has announced that its users had uploaded 750 million photos over the holiday weekend; although the irony is that they chose to announce this record effort... on Twitter.

Facebook is not so popular in Japan and according to the New York Times, Facebook users in Japan number fewer than two million, or less than 2 percent of the country’s online population.

That is in sharp contrast to the United States, where 60 percent of Internet users are on Facebook, according to the analytics site.

Mixi, Gree and Mobage-town are the local favourites and each has more than 20 million users.

Part of the reason for the aversion to using Facebook is that the Japanese jealously guard their personal privacy, preferring to use pseudonyms or nicknames. Facebook does not allow for this masking of identities.